Europe must invest more money and create better infrastructure to support science in order to remain globally competitive, said an independent panel of scientists advising the European Union in a linkurl:report;http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1424&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en released today (October 6). Image: WikimediaThe group, called the European Research Area Board (ERAB), pointed out that Europe spends only 1% of its GDP on research, in compar

A virus has a relatively easy time replicating itself. It's just a matter of hijacking a cell to generate the necessary components and in minutes, the capsid shell proteins self-assemble around a coil of viral genome. But for the glassblowers working with British artist linkurl:Luke Jerram;http://www.lukejerram.com/projects/glass_microbiology replicating a virus wasn't so easy.Luke Jerram holding his swineflu sculptureImage: The Wellcome Trust Jerram and his assistants created glass genomes, ca

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) announced today (September 30) linkurl:the appointment;http://www.embo.org/news/maria-leptin-appointed-next-director-of-embo.html of a new president: Maria Leptin, a developmental biologist at the University of Cologne, Germany. Maria LeptinImage: EMBOLeptin will be the first woman appointed to the position, and takes over from Herman Bujard, the director since 2007, who is stepping down to devote more time to his research on malaria and gen

linkurl:Francis Collins;http://www.genome.gov/10000779 and linkurl:J. Craig Venter,;http://www.jcvi.org/cms/about/bios/jcventer/ former adversaries in the race for sequencing the human genome, are two of the six life scientist who will receive the linkurl:National Medal of Science;http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Honors-Nations-Top-Scientists-and-Innovators/ this year. Image: WikipediaAlso among the awardees is linkurl:Joanna Fowler,;http://www.bnl.gov/medical/Personnel/Fow

By Edyta Zielinska Directing degradation Serhiy Pankiv The paper: S. Pankiv et al., “p62/SQSTM1 binds directly to Atg8/LC3 to facilitate degradation of ubiquitinated protein aggregates by autophagy,” J Biol Chem , 282:24131–45, 2007. (Cited in 113 papers) The finding: Terje Johansen and his colleagues at the University of Tromsø, Norway, discovered the specific molecule involved in targeting cellular waste for d

Postdocs funded by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) will soon have a better way to save for retirement. The organization this month announced the creation of an internationally portable pension plan for the 400 or so recipients of linkurl:EMBO postdoc fellowships.;http://www.embo.org/news/embo-pioneers-pension-plan-for-internationally-mobile-post-doctoral-researchers.html Image: Wikimedia CommonsIn most European countries, scientists can pay part of their salaries into a cou

Avian influenza can cause a predisposition to Parkinson's disease, according to research linkurl:published;http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0900096106 this week in the __Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.__ "It's an exciting finding," said linkurl:Malu Tansey;http://www.pdonlineresearch.org/members/profiles/266 from Emory University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. Influenza A virusImage: Wikimedia Commons, CDC, Erskine Palmer Epidemiological s

A synthetic blue dye commonly used in food coloring could protect damaged spinal cords from a second wave of injury brought on by inflammatory response to the damage, according to linkurl:a study;http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0902531106 in this week's __Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.__ When a spine is crushed -- but not severed -- patients often gets worse two to three days after the initial injury, when inflammatory cells inundate the spinal cord. The immune cells

Why does it take so long to complete a clinical trial? One bottleneck that many researchers face is enrolling enough participants to make the study statistically significant. On Monday (20 July), the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid -- aka caBIG -- announced plans to team up with the Susan Love Research Foundation to create a database of 1 million women interested in participating in clinical trials via the linkurl:Army of Women;http://researchers.armyofwomen.org/

Learning to use an implanted brain electrode to control a prosthetic or robotic arm might be easier than researchers thought, suggests a linkurl:study;http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000153 published online yesterday (21 July) in PLoS Biology. Ideally, the goal of a brain-machine interface is "to control the prosthetic naturally," said lead author linkurl:Jose Carmena;http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~carmena/ from the University of California, Berkeley. To date,

Elsevier is launching a new grant searching tool called SciVal Funding, which allows researchers to collate grant information that is otherwise dispersed in many locations across the Web. The computer program plugs researchers into the usual government, corporate and non-corporate funding sources, but it also helps them find collaborators and scan for projects that received awards in the past to hone their applications and searches. linkurl:SciVal Funding;http://www.info.funding.scival.com/ al

Experts in nanomedicine are questioning the credentials of a researcher who has portrayed himself as an expert in the fledgling field, even starting a professional society and procuring a post as editor of the journal __Nanomedicine.__ Indeed, an investigation of his credentials reveals that he claimed to hold a directorship of a non-existent program, co-authored only two original papers in nanomedicine (one of which, a co-author says, he contributed to only editorially), and was accused of mi